Elsewhere in Dreams

Experience would dictate, having seen 99 white swans, that all swans are white. Experience is of course a ridiculous guide for making future predictions: One event can change your experience in a way that the preceding events could not possibly have foretold. The 100th swan, the black swan, gives lie to the statement that all swans are white; suddenly only most swans are white, or at the very least most swans in the observed sample are white.

Ubuntu is our Free Software black swan. How do we explain its sudden, rapid rise to international Linux stardom? How do we explain its overwhelming success in that domain?

Well, we don’t. You can attempt to apply narrative to Ubuntu’s sudden critical mass, but it doesn’t work. Ubuntu was there at the right time (whatever that means) with the right feature set (not much different from others) and the right community (a little less technical than others, perhaps, but not much) and the right backing from Canonical (though other Linux distros have their own sugar daddies).

All of those statements don’t really explain how Ubuntu came to dominate Linux mindshare. In fact, I don’t think there’s any real way to make a narrative out of it. The reality is probably more like the Linux community tinkered and hacked and scratched the itch and tried things until one of those things really worked. This is a signal, to me at least, that the Linux community is growing up: We now have, like any other domain, a winner-takes-almost-all distribution. For good or for bad, this is how these things seem to go.

I think sometimes that the world is like throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. Of course there seems to be some correlation between hard work and success: Those people who work harder are likely to try more things. But you can work and work and work and work (look at Debian and Fedora and Gentoo and Linspire and a hundred others) and not have someone else steal and eat your cake.

You draw your own lesson. Does Ubuntu deserve to be where it is right now? Sure. Maybe if you’re working on another distro it seems a bit unfair. But even the words “deserve” and “fair” imply you believe there’s some kind of narrative going on. I disagree. There’s no narrative. There’s a metanarrative, and that’s what matters.

Bryce makes a good point in his latest post about Inkscape (and FOSS in general, as he points out). It is better to spend time hacking on something yourself than to offer someone $100 to do it for you. I think this is right and true for many reasons, one being that $100 is not very much money at all to pay someone for what usually ends up being quite a few hours of work.

But then there are people like me. I don’t have any coding skills at all. I don’t have enough time to pick them up. I really enjoy Ubuntu, I really like the concept of Open Source Software, and I want to help both of those things succeed. You tell me how I’m going to invest my time in a project like Inkscape. Or, even better, something simple like gTwitter, which could use some improvement. I’d love to figure out a way to help them along. I’d love pay a bounty in time to make a program I use all the time work like it should work, but I don’t have any usable skills that would help them along.

So paying your bounty in time is fine, as long as you have some sort of skill. But for the rest of us? The Joe Blows of the world who use open source software but don’t give much back? What about us?

Okay, so I installed the KDE4 Remix package over my Ubuntu 8.04 install (which is still chugging away despite me wanting to downgrade to 7.10). I just wanted to get a lay of the land and see what all the buzz is about.

When I booted into KDE4, my first thought was, Wow, this is pretty. After about five minutes using it, I thought, Wow, this is awful. I respect what the devs are trying to do with KDE4. And the beginnings they have are very nice. From what I’ve read, what’s under the hood is very nice as well. But it’s simply not ready for prime time anything. Ubuntu — for once, with this release — wisely chose not to designate Kubuntu Remix an LTS. There’s no way anyone could run this for five years or whatever. It’s barely usable. The rough edges made me want to cry.

I don’t know who designated KDE4 a release in the condition it’s in. Whoever that person is, kindly let someone else handle the releasing of things. You’re not very good at it. This is an 0.5 release, not a 4.0. Or a 4.0.4. Even early adopters do not deserve this much flagellation.

So back to Gnome I went, trailing the wounds of my experience. Literally. Removing the Kubuntu package didn’t remove all the programs that went with it, and now I’m left floundering in a sea of “K”s.

This is what I get for reading Ubuntu Planet. Another meme to make the people happy. This one is, what do you have open on your desktop? I’m including things that are living in my system tray as well.

Tranmission
Amarok
gTwitter
padevchooser
Firefox (with four tabs)
gnome-terminal
F-Spot
Hydrogen

After filing a bug or two on Launchpad I finally got filled in on why my setup is currently so horribly broken.

The long and short of the matter is this: The old Twinview/Xinerama regime is gone and done away with. They are a thing of the past, a legacy hack that had to be thrown out at some point to make way for the new and shiny xrandr.

The reason is that Xinerama doesn’t allow you to do things any sane operating system should be able to do, like hotplug monitors and projectors. Xrandr does support those things. However, it doesn’t right now support more than than dual-head setups, which is apparently the most prevalent use case out there right now.

Multiple cards and more than two monitors are in the works, and though xrandr can’t handle them right now, it will be able to in the future, perhaps even in Hardy+1.

Bottom line: If your setup includes more than two monitors running off one card, you’re screwed. Stick with 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) until you hear it’s safe to upgrade. So that’s the good/bad news.

For myself, I’m a little less infuriated now that I understand the issue a bit more. I’d urge the Ubuntu developers, though, to disclose these things a little more openly in the future. If there are going to be serious regressions, if something isn’t going to work that worked in the previous version, let me know. It’ll save me the trouble of upgrading and downgrading and a lot of shouting curses at the developers I can name. Plus, not everything is always going to be sunshine and daffodils with every release; of course things are going to change, sometimes taking a step backwards to take two steps forward, but at least let me know before hand. There’s a distinct dearth of information regarding any of the problems I’ve had, at least that I could find.

Should you ever read my frustrated little post and feel I was unfairly slagging you and your xrandr GUI, I assure you I was not. In fact, if you make this thing work for me and my four screens, I will literally give you money. I don’t make a lot, I have a very expensive mouth full of cavities, I’m still paying my and my wife’s debt, and gas costs about a buck a centilitre, but I will give you money. And I will say nice things about you to my friends. And I will distribute Ubuntu CDs to everyone I know. And I will write a song for you, record it on Ardour, and try to get it into the Ubuntu Weekly newsletter.

Just, you know, FYI.

Edit: Don’t read this. It’s just an angry rant. Read this instead, as it has actual information in it.

When I was contemplating upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10, the thing I was most worried about was the new PulseAudio subsystem being integrated into the system this release cycle. I know how much pain this caused a lot of people in the Fedora community, and I was a little apprehensive about it.

Turns out that PulseAudio actually works better than the old ESD/ALSA crap. It works way better, in fact. I installed padevchooser and it just worked. Still not the most user-friendly tool ever, but good enough for my purposes. All my applications seem to work with PulseAudio just as well as with the old and busted.

What I hadn’t been expecting, and what blind-sided me, was the X.org changes. I had heard rumblings about the auto-whatever, the new screen choosing/cloning applet, et cetera. Upon install X detected my two primary monitors (and nvidia-settings stitched them together with TwinView), which is fine and dandy, but that’s not all that I have connected to my computer. I have two X screens, not just one. Two monitors are connected to one screen, one monitor and a TV output are connected to the other. I can move between the two with my mouse, and I had learned xorg.conf-speak in order to be able to do this.

8.04 just destroyed that setup. The stupid, useless, craptacular, utterly functionality-bare Screen Resolution tool won’t detect my two primary monitors on videocard0, much less actually stitch them together to make one giant monitor like it should. Very much less detect the other two screens on videocard1. It won’t do this with the nv driver, it won’t do this with the nvidia driver from the repos, it won’t do this with the beta driver from Nvidia.com, it just doesn’t work. Period. Ubuntu’s default install still lacks all the tools needed to operate with two monitors, something that quite a few people I know are fond of and even find indispensable.

I’m so utterly frustrated with the whole fiddling with configurations thing. I recognize that Ubuntu, so far, is the best in breed of distributions, and when setting this computer up from scratch, I have no other complaint except for displays. That’s it. But this has been a thorn in the side of the Linux Desktop for many, many years now. I don’t know if the blame lies in using what seems to be an antiquated display system or binary drivers or whatever, but I simply can’t stand how this goes on and on and on.

I booted into Ubuntu just now with my two monitors and Twinview seemed to work fine. The splash page, at least, did that annoying thing where it centered the login prompt in the middle of the 2880 x 900 screen, right in the middle of the gap between two monitors, so that half my login is on one monitor and half on the other. This is okay with me; I’ve grown used to sort of glancing from one to the other. It lets me know that Twinview is working and that when Gnome starts up, I’ll be able to use all that screen real estate.

Nope! Gnome decides to switch one of my monitors off! Wonderful, thank you Gnome. It turns out that I have two metamodes in my xorg.conf, one for both monitors one, one for one monitor off and the other on, and that Gnome decided in its inexplicable wisdom to choose the second. Before you ask me why I don’t just eliminate one metamode, I’ll tell you that I play UrbanTerror, and if I don’t have that second metamode, when it plays fullscreen it does that annoying center-of-the-screen thing (like the Gnome splash), and while I can tolerate that elsewhere, playing a game is different. I want it on one screen. So I need both metamodes.

So I surf the web trying to find an answer. There is none. Most people seem rather confused as to why xorg.conf is just a stub these days, and I keep hearing rumblings about something called xrandr whose manpage is — in typical UNIX fashion — complete and utter gibberish to anyone who doesn’t already understand the tool. So I’m left to figure out on my own why X can’t initialize two screens with four monitors, using a perfectly good xorg.conf that worked just fine on Ubuntu 7.10 and the three releases before that. Finally, I decide to fire up displayconfig-gtk, which I’m told can hose my display configuration (couldn’t get more hosed, thank you!), and I find to my utter surprise that while X, nvidia-settings, and Screen Resolution cannot detect my monitors, displayconfig-gtk can… just not all four. Only two. One on each videocard. Hooray! So I set the second (on videocard1) to the primary display and find to my great astonishment that it works just fine. But only it works, and nothing else. Just the one monitor. And though nvidia-settings says the TV-out is working, it is not. So I have just the one monitor now.

I say to myself, okay, this sucks, I’ll go back to the original settings. I do this, and lo and behold I log out and log back in to find that Gnome has magically decided to use the first metamode and not the second. The second metamode is still there — I checked — but Gnome is using the first now. Why? I have no idea. I’m afraid to restart the computer now, as if I do, I might never be able to use Twinview properly again.

I absolutely cannot believe this. I know I’m a edge use case. Not a lot of people are running this many screens and monitors. But for the love of all that is good, why does my old xorg.conf not work? Has Hardy introduced a regression that causes dual videocard motherboards to ignore the second card unless a live chicken is sacrificed and something goes horribly wrong?

Gah. I’m going back to Gutsy, I really am. I can install PulseAudio myself, and install FF3 myself, thankyouverymuch. I can’t see any other big changes — except for, you know, the bad ones — that would compel me to do otherwise. I just hope that torrent is still alive somewhere.

I get a hundred posts to read, thinking, “Wonderful! A hundred insightful posts about Ubuntu!”

Instead, I get to see how many times y’all typed “sudo” in terminal. Huzzah! My revenge? I’m going to post mine.

$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
144 cd
140 ls
105 sudo
20 rdiff-backup
16 rm
10 uname
8 man
8 cp
5 exit
5 crontab

I took the plunge this weekend. I was bored, sort of, while Laura was taking a nap and decided to tinker around on the computer. I looked for a bunch of new software, interesting ways to tweak my system, all that good stuff. I didn’t really find anything interesting to do.

Now, I’m aware what “beta” means. Not the Google Beta, which seems more a liability avoidance mechanism; the actual “beta” which means “this software is not production-quality, use at your own risk”. But I decided to upgrade my current install from Ubuntu 7.10 to the 8.04 beta anyways. I’m not running a production system in any critical context: if my computer goes down for some reason, I use an older box I have sitting around.

I’ll preface everything I say here with the understanding that every upgrade from Ubuntu release to Ubuntu release is fraught with difficulty. My installs often have custom fudgery hanging around, sometime in use, sometime simple cruft. When I upgrade following the apt-get upgrade path, I often get breakage. I find it almost easier to do a clean install, seeing as my home is on a separate hard drive from the actual system. This is not Ubuntu’s fault as much as mine, of course; I can’t expect the upgrade manager to handle every edge case I throw at it.

That said, the 8.04 beta broke a whole lot of things for me, all of them relating either X11 or the NVIDIA proprietary driver:

• Compiz doesn’t work (I confirmed this is a long-standing Compiz bug) properly, leading to massive corruption of window decoration elements.
• While three of my four screens are fine, the TV-out S-video refuses to show anything on the television.
• In Totem (or Movie Player), hues are way out of wack.
• PulseAudio won’t recognise my sound card, and doesn’t seem to offer a way to select it (I love PA, btw, at least with volume controls of some kind).
• The entire sound system seems to be in a state of flux, partially one thing and partially another.
• A bunch of applets disappeared from the default Ubuntu menu, and I can’t find them back again, nor can I locate the “unlock” feature integrated with PolicyKit.
• Firefox 3.0 Beta whatever worked for a few minutes and then decided to conflict with XULrunner. I had to install FF2 again, but none of my extensions worked. The next day I installed XULrunner again, this time with no problems. Firefox 3.0 installed fine as well, though of course my extensions still don’t work, this time, I assume, for a reason.
• GNOME is taking a stupid long time to display my desktop again, up to 10 seconds on one count. Last time this happened, I uninstalled the GNOME network manager and set up my network manually; I can’t wait to get to hunt down the random component that borks GNOME. I’m actually thinking about moving to KDE once they stabilise or get to 4.1 or something.

These are all I can think of off the top of my head, but I’m really looking forward to the release candidate and (hopefully) fixes for a lot of these problems.

I know Amarok and Deluge and Firefox are the glamourous children of the packaging world, but there are a few packages I’d like to see added to Hardy. Packages that would make my professional life just a little bit easier.

1. Zimbra: PHPgroupware and OpenGroupWare don’t cut it. Zimbra — I’ve seen a functioning system! — is nice, and has risen almost to the point of competing with MS Exchange. It would be simply wonderful to be able to apt-get this sucker.
2. OpenBravo: Such an impressive piece of software. One of the few OS ERP projects with a nice website, a nice interface, and a lot of great features.
3. VMWare Server: It was in the repos, then it disappeared. I have exactly two programs I need Windows to run, and I’d like to host one of our ageing Win 2000 servers as a virtual machine running in an actually stable environment.
4. Bugzilla: Okay, this one is in the repos, but I simply can’t set it up properly. Maybe it’s just me.
5. ERP5: Apparently pretty powerful, I bet there’re quite a few people who’d want to give this a whirl.

That’s it for now. But I will be back with more…